


|| the devil gave me a crooked start

by mythaster



Category: Adventures in Odyssey
Genre: Drabble Collection, Ficlet Collection, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, M/M, Richard Maxwell Deserves Better 2k17, UPDATE: my richason feels got stronger and it's def a Thing, is it fix-it if all i'm fixing is a lack of canon closure, right now it's gen but my richard/jason feels are getting stronger so we'll see
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-28
Updated: 2018-10-04
Packaged: 2018-11-05 19:24:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11019951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mythaster/pseuds/mythaster
Summary: ...when he gave me crooked feet. ||a series of drabbles/ficlets for Richard Maxwell - some during canon, some post-Darkness Before Dawn. only two up now, but I hope to expand if it meets with whatever minuscule community approval a Richard Maxwell fic collection can attain. i love this teenage thug."BEFORE" chapters come before Darkness Before Dawn in general. "AFTER" chapters come after. title comes from "Raise Hell" by Brandi Carlile.





	1. AFTER :: groceries

Jason and Connie take him grocery shopping, which, despite everything that’s happened to him in the past handful of months, is absolutely the most ridiculous thing he’s heard for a long, long time.

Grocery shopping. What is he, a Stepford Wife? He doesn’t have time for groceries.

Except he does. He does now. That reality is a program that’ll take a while to install in his brain.

So Richard Maxwell sucks it up and goes grocery shopping. With his… friends.

He doesn’t think _that_ one’ll ever install right.

 

“Get ramen,” Connie suggests, already grabbing a plastic package, the pink kind. Shrimp. “You can eat ramen forever. That’s what the college kids say.”

Richard lets her put the ramen in the shopping cart, but he can’t keep the slight cringe off his face or out of his voice. “Maybe less ramen. I ate that a lot. I mean, a _lot_. Before.”

“Oh.” Connie hesitates, then shrugs and adds, “Well, it’s good to have on hand.” 

He manages a smile. “Hard to argue with that.”

Then Jason straightens and says, like he’s had a revelation from God, “Boxed soup,” and he drags them to the next aisle, Richard pushing the cart and trying not to run into them. “This is way better than the canned stuff,” Jason is saying as Richard slows by the soup selection. “Easy, just put it in the microwave.”

As Jason is loading the cart down with the boxed stuff - Richard just leans his crossed arms on the cart handle and waits it out - Connie points down the aisle. “Microwave corn-on-the-cob!” she exclaims.

Because _that_ sounds delicious. Jason pulls a face, apparently about to say something to that effect, but Richard leans forward, resting his chin on top of his wrists. “You guys do know,” he says, smiling sideways - his _this is a great joke I’m about tell_ smile - “that I can cook. Right?”

Jason and Connie sort of slow down and exchange glances. Richard glances between them, losing his smile. “…Right? It’s - it's important to me that you know that I can cook more than microwave soup.”

Slowly, they look back at him, and they smile in return. Those are not funny-joke smiles. They're what are you talking about, of course we know smiles. “Sure,” Jason says, dragging out the word. “Sure! We know that. …Right, Connie?”

“Um! Yeah!” she says, in that strangled lying voice she has. She’s gone up about two octaves. “I mean, obviously. You’re… you know, an adult, or something, I guess.”

Richard just looks at them, eyebrows slightly raised. “Right,” he says. “That’s a relief. So… can we move out of the ‘college student has one broken microwave to their name’ aisle and move on to the ‘I have a steady source of income and I’ve cooked for my sister since I was ten, I know how to use an oven’ aisles?”

The two mumble sheepish agreements and Richard nods, pulling the cart backwards so they can all leave the boxed soup behind. But not before Connie throws a few cans of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup in. “Just in case you get sick and need something before we bring real soup,” she says.

That makes him smile a little, for real this time, but something still makes him uncomfortable - that uninstalled program, the lingering cognitive dissonance. What he's used to and what he's got now. “Thanks,” he says. “Good idea,” he says. “Moving on,” he says. 

_Moving on._


	2. BEFORE :: end of the beginning

A chilly night meant damp, cool grass under his hands. His legs ached with a sharp, new pain, from his shins to his knees to his thighs. Smoke inhalation rubbed his throat with each breath.

He was alive. He was alive and the building in front of him burned, wood crackling and all those machines inside giving off a sickly acid smell as they burned, too. He was alive, the Castle burned, and Blackgaard was in there.

"Mister Whittaker," he said, but his voice came out too faint for the old man to hear over the sound of burning. "Mister--" Too late. He jerked to the side and threw up, bracing himself on sore hands and trembling elbows.

He felt Whittaker's grip on his shoulder again. "Richard?"

When he was done, Richard broke free from Whittaker's grasp, falling back on the grass, face-up to the evening sky. His mouth tasted disgusting. His clothes were torn and they stank like smoke.

He was filthy all over.

"Richard," Whittaker said again, kind of wheezy from the fumes, "are you okay? The police and an ambulance are on their way."

So that was that. No running away this time. No talking his way out. No exit strategy left.

"Did I kill him?" he asked. It came out in a hoarse croak.

There was a long, long silence. Somewhere far off, Richard heard the sirens. 

Finally, Whittaker sighed. "I don't know." He was sitting about a foot away from Richard now, his hands clasped together. "He might have gotten out. Might not've. We'll just have to wait."

Richard tried to speak again but his throat had tightened. He gulped and said, "I didn't - want to."

Whittaker said, "You wouldn't guess that from - well, this."

Richard closed his eyes so he couldn't see the damning hand-wave towards the burning Castle.

"I wanted to do _that_ ," he said. "To - to show him. For making me do it--" He swallowed the taste of bile. "--to Riley."

He expected the silence but he didn't expect the sharp breath Whittaker took, surprise and horror in one barely audible sound. Richard squeezed his eyes shut tighter.

He had messed up. He had really messed up. 

"And I - I got into your computer. Into Applesauce." Something huge and heavy inside Blackgaard's Castle snapped, and Richard flinched up onto one elbow, one hand already coming up to protest his face. He dropped it when he realized what had happened, then just stayed there, his gaze fixing on the burning building. Was Blackgaard--

"He hurt Lucy," Richard ground out, his throat tightening again. "But I - I let - I made it easy - easy for him to--"

His voice caught. He covered his mouth, staring at the flames in some kind of hope that they could dry the tears in his eyes. But they fell anyway, and he hiccuped on a sob as he dropped back to the grass. 

"I've helped - helped him - hurt so - so many people."

The sirens came closer, wailing their way towards the Castle. Whittaker was silent as Richard tried and failed not to cry anymore. Not that Richard wanted words. The truth would hurt and he knew anything else would be lies. 

He'd done so much. He'd hurt Lucy, and he might have sacrificed Blackgaard to his guilt. His guilt for everything, for the opening of his eyes.

His legs ached. "I've done so much," he said.

Blackgaard's Castle and maybe Blackgaard himself burned, and Whittaker raised his hand, touching it to Richard's shoulder again. 

Richard turned his head slightly towards the touch, but he didn't open his eyes. He was too tired to want to do anything else.


	3. AFTER  :: jason & the list, pt. 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richard is having trouble decorating his new apartment. Good thing someone wants to help.

Richard Maxwell had no idea how to decorate an apartment. That might have been - and this was just a wild stab in the dark - that his lack of knowledge stemmed from a lack of _things._ He just didn’t have much. Computer equipment, some leftover utilitarian tools from his days of keeping an eye on Blackgaard - that was it.

It wasn’t like fine décor had been high on his list of priorities back then.

So Connie and Lucy helped him move in to his new apartment, and it took just about as long as it took his favorite PC to power up to get everything in place. There was all his new furniture - a futon bed, a coffee table, two bookshelves, and a couple chairs - gotten at yard sales and thrift stores. He’d need a few lamps, and he made a note of that underneath the list for the grocery store.

“Are you _sure_ that’s it?” Connie asked, peering around the apartment with her hands on her hips. “It looks… I dunno, kind of unfinished.” 

“It looks like a—“ Lucy said, and then she stopped with one hundred percent tact but zero percent grace, in a way that made Richard smile. 

“Like a… prison cell?” he goaded, and when she blushed and started to protest, he gave her a nudge, a gentle elbow to the ribs. “I know. It’ll get there. I’ve just never spent my money at…” This time _he_ paused, uncertain. “Bed, Bath, and Beyond?” 

“Close enough,” Connie said dryly. “Don’t you have, like, I don’t know, a nerd poster? Table of elements? Eugene practically has nerd poster for wallpaper.”

Now _that_ was something Richard would pay to see. “Nah, that’s never been my style.” But a poster would look good. At least there would be _something_ on the walls. He added that to the list, too. As Lucy and Connie discussed the finicky subgenres of “nerd” and exactly where they thought Richard’s aesthetic lay on that spectrum, he studied the list. It was, disturbingly, easing away from the comfort of utilitarian. Food, that was straightforward; lamps could offer some hardship but, in case of freezing up, it would be easy to grab the cheapest option and run.

Posters? That was personality-based business. Posters were reflections. Cheap reflections, sure, but reflections anyway. He almost crossed it off the list, but Lucy and Connie’s discussion bubbled over and they called him over to question his preference in _Star Wars_ and _Star Trek_ , and he left the list as it was.

+

Three days later on a Saturday morning, after the Great Grocery Shopping Visit with Connie and Jason, Richard sat on the floor in the little kitchenette, eating Poptarts from the toaster on the ground. (There was no free outlet other than this one by the fridge, too far from a counter space and without a kitchen table to rest on. Hence, floor-sitting.)

Also on the floor sat a great collection of boxed and canned foods: the foodstuffs Richard hadn’t managed to put up after the Great Grocery Shopping Visit. They were still the only color in the apartment. The bright reds, yellows, and greens of the canned food, the blue of the graham cracker boxes. Richard liked looking at them. Kind of like… a domestic version of a screensaver.

He’d put them up sometime. When he was ready to face an empty apartment again.

He was staring at the box of graham crackers when the third Poptart sprung up and startled him back against the fridge, one arm coming up in front of him. He sighed and snatched the piping-hot pastry out of the toaster, grumbling under his breath. “Get it together, Maxwell. Get it together.”

Someone knocked on the door. Richard dropped the Poptart and lunged for the nearest weapon - the cheap bamboo toaster tongs, as it turned out - and then rubbed his forehead. _Get it_ together. _It’s just… Connie or Lucy, maybe. Or Mr. Allen. Calm down._

_It’s definitely not Blackgaard. He’s dead. And Jellyfish is back in prison. They all are. It’s okay._

Retrieving his slightly crumbled Poptart, Richard went to the door, raking his free hand through his sleep-mussed hair. (Who did morning rituals before breakfast on Saturday, anyway?) He opened the door to the extent of the chain lock. “Who - oh. Hey, Jason.”

It _was_ Jason. Jason, very awake, very clean and tidied for being awake and about on a Saturday morning before ten AM. He wore a tee-shirt, which wasn’t something Richard had ever seen him wear; it was for some vintage band, judging by its softness and age.

Jason bent sideways a little to see through the crack in the door, an equally crooked smile on his face. “Morning, Richard. Everything all right?" 

“Uh, yeah.” For some reason, Richard help up his Poptart. “Doing great.”

The stack of foodstuffs in the kitchen said otherwise. Richard knew he should unlatch the door and let Jason in, but Jason had been responsible for that stack of foodstuffs. Something in Richard knew Jason would ask about it, and Richard wouldn’t have an answer for it, not even a flip, glib answer, and then it would be awkward with a capital A.

Jason just looked in, still catty-cornered. “Uh… can I…? Can you…?”

“Oh, right, sure. Hold on.” Richard shut the door, unlatched it, and slid outside, shutting the door behind him. Never mind that he was only wearing pajama pants and a blanket over his bare shoulders. He adjusted the blanket, holding it shut over his chest with the modesty of a fair medieval maiden, and took a bite of Poptart. 

He was _killing it_ at the whole hosting thing.

Thankfully, Jason only looked kind of amused, his smile still sideways even though he stood up now. “What, you hiding something in there, Maxwell? I thought you were on the straight and narrow.”

“Nope.” Richard swallows his Poptart bite. “Resurrecting Blackgaard digitally. Sorry you can’t see it yet. It’ll be a doozy when it’s done.” What was he talking about? What was he saying? Talking about Blackgaard’s deadness? ’Doozy’? He crammed more Poptart in his mouth. “Wha’ you doin’ over here?” 

It took Jason a minute to puzzle out what he’d said around a mouthful of pastry, but he recovered. “Oh, just… you know. Wanted to see how you were settling in. It’s your first weekend as a normal-ish blue-collar man.” He shrugged, resting one shoulder against the doorway. “You seem… okay.”

Richard laughed, which was a mistake, because of the aforementioned mouthful of pastry. He covered his mouth, for all the good it did now that there were crumbs on the ground and Jason was smirking.

“I’m okay,” he said.

Jason just looked at him. Richard chewed determinedly, swallowing past a suddenly dry throat.

Then Jason grabbed the doorknob, opening it and leaning in to take a look. Richard knew better than to try to stop him, instead leaning back against the opposite apartment’s wall.

“What,” Jason asked after a moment of silence, “you don’t have enough kitchen shelves?”

“I’m being lazy, Whittaker. It’s my prerogative as a normal-ish blue-collar man. 

“It looks like a food horde.”

“Well, technically—" 

“It looks like something a hungry dragon lies on.”

“If it’s hungry, why would it _lie_ on the food instead of _eating_ it?”

Jason gave him a Look. It was a lot like the Look that Whit had given him, in a lot of ways. Richard made sure he looked unrepentant. It had been, at least, a logical question.

“It’s my apartment, Whittaker. If I want it to look like a college student dragon’s horde—“ Jason rolled his eyes, but Richard plunged on— “then it looks like a college student dragon’s horde.”

“It looks like a _prison cell_.” Unlike Lucy, Jason was unrepentant. “Don’t you have _anything_? Your family still lives in Odyssey, don’t they? Don’t you have anything there? Childhood blankets? Books from high school? Posters of a band you liked?”

Richard snorted. “No.” He wouldn’t go back there if he had an actual dragon’s horde of gold under the old bed. “It’s not a big deal, it really isn’t.”

“But you’re… you.” Jason gestured in Richard’s general direction, and Richard glanced down at himself, wondering what Jason meant, what Jason was seeing that Richard couldn’t. “It needs flair! Style! _Something_ to say you live in it like a normal person. This isn’t a stakeout burner motel room.”

_Flair? Style? He thinks—?_ Richard shook his head to get the thought out of his head. “Give it some time, Jase, geez. I’ve been here a week. I can’t pay you enough to _Trading Spaces_ me, so just don’t worry about it, all right?”

Maybe he’d been too harsh, too abrupt, because Jason got quiet, folding both arms over his broad chest.

“We’re just… concerned,” Jason said. “Lucy and Connie and me. About you, transitioning into… you know, life. Life as a… normal person.”

“Normal-ish blue-collar man,” Richard mumbled.

“Yeah, that.” Jason sighed. “Come on. I’m going to help you.”

Richard’s head came up. “What?”

“Clean up.” Jason jerked one hand at the door. “We’re gonna clean up your kitchen. And then we’re going out. So make yourself decent, Maxwell.”

He went inside, making himself completely at home, leaving Richard outside his own apartment, clutching his blanket closed in one hand and his Poptart in the other.

“I think I liked a life of crime better than this,” he muttered to the pastry, even though just the thought of that made his heart hurt. “I’m gonna get smothered to death if they keep this up.”


	4. AFTER :: christmas

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ayyyyy guess who didn't edit this at all before posting at 12 am? me! i didn't! that's me! No Edits O'Loserface, they call me, back at it again

It’s not Richard’s first Christmas in Odyssey; this is the town he's lived in since third or fourth grade. He knows the lights, the Christmas trees, the Nativity scenes on front lawns and perched on the hardware store roof. He knows how the snow falls and where not to step on certain sidewalks, because he’s slipped there before, multiple times, before getting wise.

It is, though, his first Christmas in Odyssey after what part of his brain refers to as the Last Blackgaard Affair. His therapist isn’t sure what to think about that name and neither is he, really, but you watch enough old spy movies while recuperating from throwing yourself out a moving car down a cliff, and how your brain reacts isn’t always up to you.

So, health-ambiguous name for what happened this past summer aside, it’s his first Christmas in what he can finally call his hometown. 

He doesn’t want it to be a big deal. He’s wrung out for big deals. For capital-A Affairs. 

“I don’t want it to be a big deal,” he says out loud, pausing his typing. “I don’t even know if I want to buy a Christmas tree.”

There is an strangled squeaking sound from the counter, and he glances over his shoulder, at where Connie is visibly holding her feelings and her words back from vocalization. The effort probably hurts, judging by the way she’s cleaning the ice cream-spattered counter the way a hair waxer might take the chest hair off a romantic rival. 

“Maybe a little one,” he amends, “like for a side table,” and the muscles showing in her biceps and jaw recede.

“It’s fine,” she says, without looking at him. “It’s fine! Christmas can be tough, I get it! It’s fine. It’s fine!”

The Whit’s End website really needs the help Richard was involved in giving it, before he inexplicably opened his mouth to talk about the upcoming holiday in about two weeks’ time, but he’s a little concerned about Connie getting… ideas. Odyssean ideas.

“Connie,” he says, leaning one elbow on his swivel chair. 

“Hmm-mmm?” She examines her blue fingernails, schooling her expression, before looking up at him, all innocence.

“You’re not… planning anything, are you?”

She makes three gestures - an opening mouth, a hand-touching-chest, a both-hands-in-the-air - before saying, “Planning? I don’t know what that means.”

“I don’t want Christmas to be a big deal,” he repeats.

Connie is even more emphatically all innocence as she nods and turns back to scrubbing the counter. “I heard you the first time, Richard, I don’t know why you have to pretend I’m deaf or something, I heard you, I get it, it’s not a big deal, you don’t want it to be special or anything - I get it.”

Connie getting it isn’t what worries Richard. He knows she’s smart enough to get it. What worries him is this: is she going to take him seriously?

He turns back to the website and rubs his temple. Maybe he should think about another bus ticket. Just for the holidays.

+++

Odyssey being the town it is, it unsettles Richard when it doesn’t get discussed much around him. Sure, Whit’s End gets decorated - he helps! Because he’s an employee, and, God help him, he likes hanging around with them. Lucy’s there, too, sometimes, which is fun, because Lucy doesn’t skitter or get nervous when he has to use his cane because climbing ladders to hang lights and wreaths and mistletoe can make him sore, and because she’s Lucy. She’s doing good stuff, getting ready for college, dual-enrolling, the kind of thing she’d obviously be good at. It’s impossible to get tired of hearing Lucy talk about the things she loves, the things she’s good at.

Sometimes Jason comes in to help, too. Richard doesn’t climb ladders those days because he couldn’t trust his easily liquified muscles to hold him up. One time, the door bell rang - triple, since Connie put a knot of jingle bells there, too - while Richard was trying to hang mistletoe, and when Jason came in, Richard dropped the mistletoe on his own face and then just about fell in the decorations box. Lucy had a good laugh while Connie and Jason made a big deal of helping Richard back up, which he didn’t need, both because he’s capable of standing on his own, even when the aches do come, and also because… Jason.

It’s those things that keep Richard up at night. The silence about Christmas. The mistletoe. The Jason scares. The fact that Connie barely ever looks him in the eye anymore.

One day, Whit starts a sentence with the word “Christmas” and Connie almost breaks her throat clearing it, then jerks her head in Richard’s direction. Richard throws both hands in the air, said, “Oh, my God, I didn’t mean it was verboten, I just meant—“ and is, either mercifully or frustratingly, interrupted when Eugene came in with a semi-emergency regarding the Imagination Station. Both Whit and Connie leave to examine and clean up the scene, and Richard is left alone with his laptop, fully prepared to tear out his hair, a little stymied that he was robbed of the opportunity to do so in front of an audience.

I still don’t want it to be a big deal, he thinks that night, tossing in bed. Somewhere outside, a car drives by with “Last Christmas” on full blast, windows probably rolled down. 

+++

“So… which one is better, you think?” Richard asks the dollar store employee.

The employee looks at him with what could be considered disbelief, if disbelief could also lack any sort of emotional connection whatsoever. 

“They’re both twenty,” he says, like that answers what Richard asked.

He should have known better than to go to a Dollar General somewhere out in the wasteland between Odyssey and Connellsville. Hard habit to break, lying low. The Odyssey hardware store with its rooftop Jesus probably would have been a better bet. Still, he’s here, and he did tell Connie he would get one.

He grabs the two-foot plastic Christmas tree, the one with colored lights and no ornaments, instead of the one with colorless lights and small, cheap ornaments rattling in the bottom of the cardboard case, and carts it to the front of the store. 

A small deal, he thinks, paying the cashier. It’s a small deal. I can handle that.

+++

Whit’s End is open on Christmas Eve, but only until noon. Whit has told him that he doesn’t have to come in to work, but Richard does anyway, not because he doesn’t have anything better to do, which he doesn’t, but that’s not the point, because he wants to come in. At least he’ll have something going on until twelve.

It’s snowing. He’s bundled up in a red peacoat he found at a Goodwill in Connellsville. The lights are on everywhere, glittering in the white-shellacked atmosphere; the smell is Christmas, the sound is Christmas, the air and the crunch under his boots are Christmas. It’s a slow walk, and he thinks it, hard, so he’ll believe it: This is Christmas.

And that’s how it goes for the rest of the work day. He didn’t sleep well the night before - he never has, on Christmas Eve Eve - and he convinces the others that he needs to work in a back office for most of the day. 

It’s not a big deal. There are too many disappointments packed into a collection of his twenty-odd 25ths, anyway, a disconnect between the day on commercials and in kids’ movies and what he’s known. There’s no reason to start getting excited about it now.

Someone knocks at the office door, and Richard minimizes the screen on which he was scrolling through TV Tropes, blatantly time-thieving off of Whit’s generosity. Old habits. “Come in.”

Connie pokes her head in. “Workin’ hard?”

“Uh… yeah. You could say that.” He brings up the Whit’s End website homepage, which now has tastefully blinking colored lights around the edges of the screen. “Ta-da?”

“Hey, it’s better than I could do. I bet Whit’ll love it.” She comes in all the way, a plate of honest-to-God Christmas cookies in her hands. She puts them on the desk by his right hand, then reaches over him and opens the blinds. Richard pretends to hiss and hide behind his arms.

“Yeah, yeah, Eugene does the same thing to me except I don’t think he’s kidding. I’m not scared by you, Maxwell.” She leans against the desk and nudges the plate a little more towards him. “They’re fresh; we all helped make them.”

One red-sprinkled cookie halfway to his mouth already, Richard pauses. “Including Eugene?”

Connie shrugs. “Well, we let him read the instructions out loud.”

He grins and takes a bit. It’s sugary and warm and soft, a little crumbly. “Thanks, Connie.”

“No problem; we’ve got so many out there. You can take some home, too. It’s almost twelve, you know.”

“Oh, it is?” He’d been reading too much TV Tropes. “Okay, I’ll finish up.”

“No rush.” 

He does, though, because he’s already gotten locked in Whit’s End once before, when he forget that closing times were a thing and the others forgot that Whit had hired him and he came out blinking into an empty and securely locked building and he ended up sleeping on a booth and scaring the daylights out of Eugene the next morning because he was too afraid of breaking something or setting off an alarm to even try jimmying a lock, and it took a full month for them to stop calling him Boothman like it was actually funny and not them being small-town weirdos, and eventually he had to laugh, too, and it got easier to resist saying he’d slept in worse places. Anyway, that’s why he hurries, and he’s expecting a quiet, darkened front room when he gets out with his computer bag slung over his shoulder, the others already gone except, maybe, for Whit, who always closes up last, and maybe they’ll exchange “Merry Christmases” before Richard goes home and doesn’t see anyone else until the holiday is over, because… where is he supposed to go?

But the front room isn’t darkened, though the Closed sign is flipped outward; instead, it’s still brightly lit with Christmas tree lights, including the ones on the actual Christmas tree, which was set up somewhere towards the back of the room but which they’ve dragged to the middle, close to the line of booths in front of the window. Everyone’s there: Connie, Whit, Lucy, Eugene, Jason, and enough of those people don’t work at Whit’s End and shouldn’t be there when it’s functionally closed that Richard knows he’s walked into a trap, and he can feel his tense body go limp at the realization, because Thank God.

Jason is talking when Richard walks in but Lucy notices him and brightens, waving him over. The others see him then, too, and there’s something in the lack of judgment in their eyes when they land on him - the idea that seeing him is nothing less than an acceptable distraction, and potentially more - there’s something about it that makes Richard feel more okay with being this exposed than he’s felt in a long time. Something eases, and the colors click. The snow falls right outside. He wouldn’t be surprised if faux fur-wrapped carolers materialized just outside the door to sing “Joy To the World,” right on cue.

“Hot chocolate,” Whit says, pushing it towards the last empty seat in the booth. The booth, Richard notes, where he had to sleep that one time. They would. Probably Lucy’s idea. “Strawberry marshmallows, right?”

“Uh… right.” Richard slings his computer bag off his shoulder again and sits, rolling his shoulders and trying to be casual about it even though every emotion in body is threatening to revolt. He takes the mug in both hands and lets it warm him, even sting him when it gets too hot. “Thanks.”

“Strawberry marshmallows.” Jason makes a slight face. “Doesn’t sound great.”

“It’s not great, exactly—“ Richard pokes at the floating, pink-tinged mounds of melting white— “but it’s kind of like, the next best thing to chocolate-covered strawberries, right?”

“It’s disgusting,” Lucy says, stirring her spoon in what looks like coffee, and Connie nods her agreement. “He needs an intervention.”

“Well, you’re drinking full-caf coffee,” Richard says, pointing his own spoon at her and then popping a soggy pink marshmallow in his mouth. “You’re not old enough for that.”

“It’s caffeine, not alcohol.”

“Whit, you really serve caffeinated coffee to children?”

“‘Children’?”

“On Christmas, yes.”

“‘Children’?”

“I started drinking caffeinated beverages much earlier than Lucy’s current age,” Eugene puts in.

“Which explains so much,” Connie says.

And so it goes. 

There are more cookies, cookies until Richard feels like he’ll have to puke it back up if he lets one more sprinkle pass his lips, and after the hot chocolate there’s spicy homemade cider. There are no presents under the tree, and the radio in the corner is so old that it only picks up the most basic, crowd-pleasingest station there is, which means they hear the same five songs on rotation, or at least, that’s what it feels like, in between the streaks of static that settles like warm fuzz around the room. The heat is turned up and churns over their heads, a soothing background noise that blends with static and laughter and the sound of an occasional car trundling past outside or a muffled conversation from passersby along the sidewalk.

Richard leans back and participates by turns. His feet knock against Jason’s once or twice; the first time, he knows it’s an accident, but the second time, Jason catches his eye, on purpose, for a solitary heartbeat before looking away again and laughing at something Connie says. Richard, deeply and exquisitely aware that Jason is, in fact, sitting next to his father, surges to his feet to refill his cider mug.

In the kitchen, he takes a deep breath and leans both elbows on the counter, sliding his hands through his hair and scrubbing at his scalp. Cider steams gently in his topped-off mug and he considers the curls of mist rising from the surface.

“Connie said you didn’t want a big Christmas deal.”

Richard straightens up quick and turns, and he knows exactly why he turns red at the sight of Mr. Whittaker, even though he has no reason to.

“So we didn’t make one,” Whit continues, coming to rest against the kitchen counter at Richard’s side. “Just a little bit of an after-work fun. It’s not too much, is it?”

Richard picks up the mug and cradles it in both hands. “Can I be grossly honest, Mr. Whittaker?”

“Please.”

“It’s… ideal.”

Whit smiles and puts a hand lightly on Richard’s back, leaving it to rest there as Richard sips at his mug, uncertain if Whit wants him to respond, but blanking on what that response could be. So he doesn’t react, except to try to loosen the muscles in his shoulders. 

“There’ve been days that I hated Christmas. Don’t worry too much about sliding into it right away.” Whit shrugs. “Or at all. We’re your friends now. You don’t have to perform for us. Not even Connie.”

“Thanks.” Richard sips at the cider, hoping the too-hot beverage will ease the knot in his throat. “It’s… it’s been a good start. To the whole… celebrating thing.”

“I’m glad.” Whit pushes off the counter and heads back towards the front room. “Take your time.”

Richard does. But it doesn’t take too long, or too far down into his fresh cider, for him to go back out with the others, to sit by Lucy and across from Jason, to listen and to talk, and to let his heart finally stop knocking against his ribs. The first time he laughs, really laughs, without nerves or bravado behind it, it takes him three seconds to realize it, and then it makes him quiet. But not for long. Laughing, really laughing, is too good to give up again.

+++

At home, Richard unzips his computer bag only to find that it doesn’t just hold his computer. There’s a package inside, small and wrapped in silver foil paper that shimmers in a spectrum of colors when it’s moved. Suddenly nervous, Richard eases his computer bag away, leaving the package the only thing left on the table.

The package is unadorned, but when Richard turns it over, he sees the handwritten label.

To: Richard  
From: Jason

His stomach, already uneasy, plunges into his shoes, or into his mouth - it’s hard to tell. 

He put this in my bag. I didn’t even see him do it. Me. The most paranoid guy I know.

It’s both logical - Richard hadn’t been on his guard that day, and why should he have been? - and, if he’s going to be grossly honest with himself, too, a little bit hot.

There is nothing in the world that he’d rather do right now than open the package - what could be in it? What could Jason want to give Richard that would require subterfuge? - but he makes himself put it on the coffee table, underneath his lit tree, and wait for the morning.

Something gets into him that evening, watching stop-motion movies and eating his nightly ramen that he made holiday-appropriate with red food dye and green-dyed egg slices, because packaged ramen isn’t already unhealthy enough. He takes two of the cookies that he brought home with him from work, puts them on a small paper plate, and leaves them under the tree, on the other side as the package.

Great, he thinks as he climbs into bed and turns out the last light of Christmas Eve. I did it. A small-deal Christmas. Perfect.

And, weirdly, it was.

+++

He sneaks out of bed at six in the morning, makes himself coffee, eats one of the cookies Santa didn’t take the night before, and sits on the floor to open Jason’s present, his hands once again turning into a trembling mess. 

What did he want so bad to give me?

The paper unpeels from its contents, and they spill out onto Richard’s lap.

Socks. Six pairs of socks. Brightly colored, a few with patterns, one with llamas wearing novelty glasses.

Richard laughs. He laughs, and puts one pair on, and laughs, and puts on one sock from one pair and another sock from another pair, and laughs, and laughs, and laughs.


End file.
